Dawn crept thin and colorless over the marshes, rinsing the frost to dull silver. Myrren kept her eyes on the horizon, afraid to glance at Corven’s back. He walked ahead in silence, cloak drawn close, every step measured as if sound itself might shatter what lingered between them. The hum in her satchel had softened to a heartbeat, steady, patient, leading rather than warning. When the mist parted, rooftops rose from the reeds. The air shifted with flour dust, sour yeast, and the faint sweetness of fevered skin.
The smell met them first. Rotten grain. Sweat. Death disguised as bread.
Smoke drifted from the village ovens, thin and gray. Every door stood open, every hearth cold. Crows lined the fences, too fat for famine. Myrren’s stomach turned as she knelt beside the first body of an old man slumped against his table, crumbs glued to his chin. The crust in his hand was laced with a blue-white powder she knew too well.
“Aconite,” she whispered. “Masked with ironwood.” The words tasted of Graymere Road.
Corven crouched opposite her, eyes steady. “You’ve seen this before.”
“Months ago. An inn off the trade route. Same tremors, same rash.” Her fingers brushed the man’s wrist. The skin burned faintly even in death. “Only the dosage changed. This one’s cleaner. Someone improved it.”
His jaw tightened. “Bread fever, the guards called it.”
“Poison bread,” she corrected. “The ovens themselves are tainted.”
Wind slid through the thatch, carrying the smell of yeast gone sweet with decay. Myrren rose, turning toward the square. Five bodies lay in a line before the well with mothers, children, a miller still clutching a ledger. She pressed a sleeve over her mouth. “They didn’t eat spoiled grain. They were dosed.”
Corven’s shadow lengthened across the dirt. “And the one who dosed them?”
A sound answered him, a weak cough from a half-collapsed doorway. Myrren darted forward. Inside, a woman sat against the wall, eyes fever-bright, skin slick with sweat. She flinched when Myrren knelt.
“Hush,” Myrren murmured, reaching for her satchel. “Tell me what happened.”
The woman’s voice cracked like dry bark. “She came before. The girl with the chain eyes. Said the bread would heal us. Said we’d eat and never hunger again.”
Myrren froze. Corven’s breath caught behind her.
“The girl with the..” she began.
But the woman had already gone still, eyes glassed over, lips parted in a half-smile.
Silence pooled between them. Then Corven said, “You already knew.”
She looked up sharply.
“You always know,” he finished, and the way he said it, half accusation, half awe, struck deeper than any poison.
Her pulse faltered. She turned away, staring at the oven smoke curling into gray spirals above the rooftops. The hum in her satchel throbbed once, as if in answer.
By afternoon the frost had melted into mud, and the stench of the ovens thickened until it clung to their skin. Myrren worked in silence, sleeves rolled, grinding residue between her fingers on a strip of parchment. Gray-white dust stained the edges like ash.
“It isn’t just aconite anymore,” she said. “See the sheen? Someone tempered it with silverroot. It keeps the fever steady instead of seizing the heart. A slow-burn toxin.” Her stomach turned. “Someone learned from Graymere.”
Corven’s gaze tracked the circle of dead huts. “Then someone watched you there.”
She looked up, startled. He didn’t flinch. “Whoever repeats your poisons improves them. They’re not copying the crown’s alchemists, Myrren, they’re copying you.”
The accusation hollowed her chest. She stared at the smear of powder on her glove. It gleamed faintly, like frostmint, the masking agent from her old journals, the one she swore she’d destroyed. “Impossible,” she whispered, but her voice shook. “Those formulas burned years ago.”
“Perhaps not all.” He drew from his coat a torn scrap stamped with the Frostmint crest, the royal archive’s seal, and Kael Droveth’s mark. It had been pinned to a crate outside the mill. “Your work is traveling faster than rumor.”
Her breath caught. Kael catalogued poisons for the Queen’s court; if his shipments had reached this far, the crown already knew about the outbreak or worse, sanctioned the testing. Famine relief, they’d call it. “Bread to feed the border,” she murmured. “Only it kills them.”
Corven’s silence was answer enough.
A crow cawed from the roof, scattering ash. Myrren rose, brushing her skirts. “The Queen will call this an accident. She’ll send tasters and testers, and when they die, she’ll call for a trial.”
“For you,” Corven said.
She met his eyes. “There’s always a scapegoat. It keeps the crown clean.”
Wind pushed through the square, rattling the mill’s empty sacks. In their whisper she thought she heard Ori’s voice in a the dream warning that never faded: the antidote will fail. Her pulse thudded in her throat. If the same pattern repeated, the failure was already written.
Corven stepped closer, careful not to touch her. “The tether hums harder here,” he said quietly. “It pulls like a memory. Do you feel it?”
She did, the faint tightening under her ribs, the echo of that midnight dream where Thane’s light and Corven’s shadow had blurred together. But she forced the words out steadily. “It’s only exhaustion.”
He didn’t believe her. He never did. “Or déjà vu,” he murmured. “You said this once, in another village. Right before you collapsed.”
She stiffened. “I’ve never been here.”
“No,” he agreed, “but the spiral has.”
Their eyes locked. Between them, the hum in her satchel quickened, beating like a trapped heart. A gust stirred the ash in the square into a rising spiral before it scattered to nothing.
Somewhere beyond the hills, a messenger horn sounded a the thin note of a royal patrol approaching. Corven’s hand went to his blade. Myrren only closed the sample vial and whispered, “Too late. They’re already inside the loop.”
The horn faded, swallowed by distance. Dusk bled through the mist again, painting the fields in bruised gold. Myrren packed her instruments in silence, gloved fingers trembling. The world smelled of wet ash and bread gone sweet with death.
“Leave the samples,” Corven said. “If the patrol finds you with them..”
“They’ll think I caused it anyway.” She tied the satchel shut. “Proof or no proof, I’m always the variable.”
He hesitated, then reached out, not touching, only hovering close enough that the air bent between them. “You can still run.”
Her laugh came thin. “And prove guilt by flight? No, Corven. If this is another loop, I want to see where it ends.”
The tether pulsed once, as if in answer. A faint heat spread from her wrist to her throat, soft and relentless.
They left the square behind. The last light flickered against shuttered windows; the ovens still smoked like open graves. Myrren’s steps slowed near the mill where Kael’s crest marked the broken crates. A single crate stood unopened. She pried the lid with her knife.
Inside lay sacks of flour sealed in wax…and something wrapped in linen. She unrolled it carefully.
A glass vial. Clear, uncracked. The wax stopper bore a faint spiral pressed into red sealant, her spiral, the mark she used on unfinished work. Inside shimmered a pale antidote fluid.
She stared. “I never made this.”
Corven’s shadow crossed the light. “Then who did?”
The vial felt warm in her palm. Her own handwriting curved across the label, unmistakable: Frostbane – Failsafe II. Her throat constricted. Failsafe I had been Graymere’s antidote, the one she’d barely saved with. Failsafe II should not exist.
A whisper slid through her mind, Ori’s voice not from memory but from the dream-loop: “The antidote will fail.”
She nearly dropped the vial. The hum in her satchel surged, vibrating against the glass. For a heartbeat she saw herself standing here before, the same crate, same dusk but alone, and the vial shattered in her hand.
She blinked; the image vanished.
“Myrren?” Corven’s tone sharpened.
She closed her fist around the vial. “Nothing,” she lied.
But her pulse thudded in time with the hum, and the fluid inside the glass glowed faintly, as if alive. She could smell silverroot and frostmint, the exact balance she’d discovered yesterday. The antidote existed before she’d finished it.
Corven stepped closer, shadows twitching at his heels. “What did you find?”
She met his gaze, fear and understanding burning the same color. “A cure,” she whispered, “I haven’t made yet.”
The tether went taut between them, then snapped like a string of light.
Ash spiraled up from the mill floor, spinning around the vial until its glow turned red.
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